la_belle_laide | dreams and swords...

This morning I had this dream about swords, LAARPers, rings of metal with running lights, hills, fountains and other crazy things. I don't exactly remember how it started, but I think I had some kind of assignment to finish, a kind of homework thing. (That's not entirely surprising: I've got a lot of stuff to do before Friday's show, like making CDs and setting the iPod and some rehearsals and various other smaller things that I still need to finish up.) After I finished these assignments, I could go and meet up with some people who had swords. I really don't know how that made sense even in the context of the dream, but clearly it's left over from my obsession with the broadsword form.

So I finished my assignments, packed my Celtic sword into a backpack--I wanted to bring a broadsword, but I don't have one and I figured the Celtic sword that I do own in real life is about the same length--and I wandered up this hill in the desert, where there were these two men waiting for me. One of them looked like your basic, bearded Renfest kind of guy, and he had all manner of swords. One was a sword that curled all around on a flat plane, and it fit into this flexible scabbard. The blade was very ornate, almost like metal lace. Another was a katana just like the one I have. Then he took this other sword out of his bag, and it was made of slate. It was just a big, flat, one-foot-square piece of colorful slate on a hilt, and it shone like it was wet. He handed it to me and I bit it, to test if it was brittle or not, and I left teeth-marks in it. "But it's quiet," he told me. "That's what makes this one so special."

The other guy said, "Are we going to play?"

"I thought we came here to train," I said.

"But training is playing," the Renfest guy said. "And playing is good practice."

"This is kind of like live-action roleplay," I told him.

"That's what we do," they both said.

But before we could get to do anything, thousands of people started charging over the hills, screaming and waving swords at us. I thought, "They think that we're here to start a war, because we have all these weapons." They started coming towards us really fast, and they were furiously angry.

I jumped into a tire swing that was hanging seemingly from nowhere, because I figured it would help me get away from the screaming mass of people. I started swinging all around the hill, and only then did I notice how precarious it was. I thought then that it was a good thing I hadn't started practicing my sword form on the hill, because it was a small space and a steep drop on all sides.

The Renfest guy started yelling to the crowd, "We're not here for war! We're just here to play! We're not terrorists, we're just sword-geeks!"

I felt the crowd start to calm down and listen to him. I kept swinging on the tire, and it was getting lower and lower and kind of circling around the bottom of the hill. On one pass, I took a glimpse into the underside of the hill, where I could see a passage to somewhere, and I could hear water running. I wondered if the other two guys there knew about this passage. Could they have been playing here for so many years and never discovered it, because they only ran around on the top of the hill, and never under it?

"We only come here," the Renfest guy was yelling to the crowd (they had stopped running towards us,) "because it's a nice, quiet place to play!"

I swung by him on my tire and asked him, "Hey, did you guys know..." but I didn't finish the sentence because I swung by too fast. Then I figured, maybe they did know, or if they hadn't before, they did now.

On my next swing by the bottom of the hill, I jumped off the tire and landed in the underground passage. The walls were covered with ancient, decorative tiles, and the floor had smaller tiles. In the center of the room there was a two-tiered fountain. All around it were these flexible metal runners, about an inch wide and sort of sepia-colored, also with this very intricate, lacey design. In the holes carved in them were running lights. I thought of them, "That's not electricity, because this place was built long before electricity. Those lights run on something else."

The Renfest guy was still holding the crowd off, but he was coming down the hill, still talking. "We come here because there's water ... and where there's water, there's life; water and life."

On the floor was a piece of the lacey, lighted up metal, broken off and curled into a small circle. It looked like a wedding ring, and I thought if I took it, I could be married to whatever magic ran this place.

"Because there's water..." the guy said, "...and life."

I realized that he was actually calling someone with an incantation, some person who was going to come out of the fountain. I could just about picture the person he was calling, and I knew he would be old, a cliche Merlin type figure in my mind. I totally couldn't wait to see him. All of a sudden I had all of my swords in a bag I was carrying on my back, and I put them down on the ground to show them to him. I finally realized that the katana would work better for the sword form than the Celtic sword. I still didn't have a broad-sword, and I really wished I had one so that I could show him what the sword form was really supposed to look like. (In my dream, I was going to do it perfectly.) And I knew that once the guy said his third "water and life" incantation, the Merlin type guy would appear out of the fountain.

"There's water..." the Renfest guy said.

And then my alarm went off. >_>

I knew as soon as I woke up that I would take a sword home today.

The afternoon was completely manic. Jeremy called and asked if I could take him to pick up a car that he had bought from someone, but he knew the car wouldn't start so he'd have to jump it, and other kinds of car-type things that I know nothing about. My Dad volunteered to go; he knows just about everything about cars. Just as well, because I had to exchange the neat little camera I'd gotten at Best Buy the other day because it only recorded in .mov and was only playable with Quicktime, which I hate and which doesn't work with Movie Maker. The exchange process was a miserable mess (there was still the 15% restocking fee,) and I had to wait about twenty minutes before anyone in the digital camera department was available, and then when he was, he said there was no way to tell which camera would work in Movie Maker or open with Windows Media. Eventually one of the Geek Squad kids came to the rescue. But I was at Best Buy for over a freaking hour before exchanging for a camera that, while it was cheaper, the memory card was much more expensive etc. What a pain. And I had to go a bunch of other places, too. By the time I got home, I had to eat and run. Jeremy was still around, and he ended up not getting his car because it was basically dead and rusted into the ground. I swear, if he didn't have bad luck, he'd have no luck at all.

Then my car got a flat tire. I had to ask Mom if I could borrow her car, and I was running late. Sifu and I showed up at the same time, 4:10. (I wish I'd gotten there sooner so I could have opened all the doors and stuff. ^_^ ) There was really nothing to do, and no private lessons going on, so I vacuumed the mats, the floors, and started cleaning the shrine. Then the kids' class started.

(Can I just make a general tangential observation? Okay, I'm not generally wild about other people's children. I hope someday to have one of my own and I'm pretty sure I'll like that one, but usually children irritate me. The kids in Kung Fu, though, are, with few exceptions, beautifully polite, smart, and funny. I talked for a while with one of my training sister's beautiful kids, a boy and girl between the ages of 6 and 8 I think. I swear, any kid of mine is going into Kung Fu as soon as they are allowed.)

Small class today, with Chris K., Lee, Greg, Iris and Erica being out. There were only six of us. In warmups, we all yammered about movies and mostly laughed through the entire thing. In basics class, we did advanced Choy Lei Fut drills, which were fun and very fulfilling. Then it was outside to move on with the broadsword form, which gets more intricate and beautiful and deadly with each new move. After class, Chris C. was trying to teach me the figure 8 sword swinging thing. I nearly got it at one point, but I was using the metal sword and was a little intimidated.

Afterwards, Sifu asked if he should go ahead and order our own swords for us. I practically leapt out of my skin. YES! I do want my own new, shiny beautiful, live blade! If he remembers (and if they send them to the right school this time,) we should have them by the time we return from break. (We're closed all next week and the following Monday. >_> ) But just before I left, Sifu said that I could take home the school's metal sword so that I could practice all I wanted. He even said that I could come down when the school was closed and train if I felt like it. ^_^

The school's broadsword is such an old, battered thing with dings and nicks in it, and the pommel (I think that's what you call it in a Chinese broadsword--although maybe not; it's probably got an actual Chinese name,) is all loose and rattles around when you swing it. And it's missing the tassle, which Sifu said I could repair if I wanted to. But I just about floated out of the place with that old sword in my hand, grinning the entire way.

I knew that I would be taking a blade home with me tonight.